Marge Levine, Bio


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Photo of Marge Levine

In an art review in the Times of Trenton, Janet Purcell said, “If you’re looking for works of art that are simply beautiful, you need look no further than Marge Levine’s pastels. She captures the mood and atmosphere like none other.” That has always been my goal as an artist. Another reviewer commented, “Her work is a paradox, intricately real yet softly impressionistic.” The paradox of my work derives from my belief that while it is important to capture precisely the details of what I observe in nature, my primary effort is to capture the way what I am observing makes me feel – the atmosphere more than the detail, although they should not be incompatible. One of the first influences on my work in plein air was the art of J. M. W. Turner whose work I most fully encountered while living in Cambridge, England for a year. Not that I try to capture the epic breadth of his work, but that I felt how powerfully he could represent the way a landscape felt and the way it moved him and find in it magical and lovely things that the ordinary eye would miss.

As I work in nature, I somehow find in the most ordinary details of a landscape things beautiful and remarkable, and I try to represent the experience of that discovery in different ways in each of my paintings. My ability to find patterns and designs in nature and the beautiful in the ordinary is partly the result of my early training as a textile designer. To my eye, nature itself can be a gorgeous, intricate and moving design.

Marge is a Signature member of the Pastel Society of America, The Pastel Painters Society of Cape Cod, the Degas Pastel Society, The Plein Air Painters of the Jersey Coast, The Pastel Society of New Jersey and a juried member of the Salmagundi Club.

Since 2001, when she started working in pastels, she has won awards in many National pastel shows. In 2007, she received the first scholarship award to be given by the International Pastel Societies. Other awards include the Silver Award in the Great Lakes Pastel Society National Show (2010), Dakota Art Award from the Northwest Pastel Society 16th Open International Exhibition (2008), The Louisa Melrose Gallery Award from the Pastel Society of America 33rd annual exhibition (2005), Best of Genre from the National Northeast Pastel Society (2005), Honorable Mention from the American Impressionist Society (2006), the Dakota Art Award from the Pastel Society of New Mexico (2004). She has been featured in articles in American Artist Magazine (April 2006) and in "One Hundred Ways to Paint the Landscape", an International Artist's Magazine publication. Her other published works have been for children's books, one one of which was published by Simon and Schuster. In addition, she illustrated "Life Birds" by George Levine, for Rutgers University Press. She also gives demonstrations, classes and leads paint outs in New Jersey, and California.

Education:
Associate in Applied Science Degree from the Fashion Institute of Design and Technology, 1952.
Workshops with Richard McKinley, Albert Handell, Elizabeth Mowry, Duane Wakeham, Alan Flattmann, Skip Whitcomb, Stan Sperlak, Clark Mitchell, and Moses Sawyer.

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